Tag: Puppies

Sad Puppies: A Retrospective

In which Brad Torgerson, who took up the Sad Puppies mantle when Larry Correia retired from the science fiction award scene, shares his thoughts on our successful nuking of the Hugo Awards.

One of the most fascinating things about the past ten years has been watching different people who weren’t part of Sad Puppies speak authoritatively on Sad Puppies. I have my own thoughts, of course. Understand that everything I am about to say, I say as a guy with several authorial accolades under his belt, including the DragonCon Dragon for Best SF novel in 2019, and three readers’ choice awards from Analog magazine in 2010, 2012, and 2014. I was also the rare triple-nominee for Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell awards in 2012.

So . . . did Sad Puppies fail?

For my part I wanted the Hugos to have broad cultural relevance within literary SF again. Versus continuing their long slide into activism-induced irrelevance. In this regard Sad Puppies 3 failed spectacularly. The net dividend of 2015 was the power brokers of Worldcon declaring, “We’re gonna Feminist and Queer the Hugos even HARDER!” and that’s precisely how it went. The Hugos are now ignored by the great majority of spec fic and fantasy readers because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt the award has been made into an explicitly political activist totem. As of 2026 only a fraction of spec fic and fantasy readers even know who the Hugo winners are year to year, and most who remember the Hugos think of the Hugos as they think of almost all entertainment awards: that legacy thing we used to care about but we’ve stopped caring about because people on stages giving each other trophies doesn’t matter to the consumer like it did a few decades ago. It was already becoming true by 2010.

Much moreso, now. Grammys, Emmys, Oscars, yadda. Just don’t have the cultural heft of the 1970s-1990s. And the same for both the Hugo and Nebula. Which are not signposts of quality (on a book cover) like they once were. In fact, for many readers they are a, “Stay away, this is a Modern Audience (said in Drinker voice) book!” And that’s precisely what I wanted reversed. Because I remember when the words HUGO WINNER and NEBULA WINNER on a dust jacket actually described what was between the covers. Like with Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. But the opposite occurred. Because the Nielsen-Haydens and George R. R. Martin and many other people with media reach and influence decreed that no dirty normal Hugo voters would have a say in their sainted backroom politicized log-rolling process. The Hugos would be perma-Woke.

And so they are. And that’s a damned shame, because most readers don’t give the Hugos any regard anymore—as they don’t give most lit awards any regard. And if you doubt it ask yourself if Ann Leckie is bigger than Heinlein? Who has been dead for decades. But he outsells Leckie 20 to 1 on Grandpa Bob’s slow days. They hate Heinlein for that. They want him dustbinned. They tried their best to make Leckie into a thing. Heaped every award possible on her between 2014 and 2016. And all that resulted were massive stacks of deluxe boxed merchandise at B&N locations. With the words HAS WON EVERY SCIENCE FICTION AWARD KNOWN TO MAN plastered across the slipcases and the special selection signage.

But the merchandise didn’t move. I repeat: the merchandise didn’t move. They tried the same thing from ’16-’18 with Nora Jemisin, and it was a similar result: triple-Hugo Best Novels that sat on shelves. And kept sitting. Neither Leckie nor Jemisin are bigger than Heinlein. Both remain midlist activist authors who could not be catapulted over the cultural relevance wall by any means, because that’s not how a literary work (nor author) achieves long-standing relevance in both geek culture and the wider English-speaking culture as a whole. You know who does have relevance? J.K. Rowling. Or Orson Scott Card. Or any dozen other caps-n Names nobody needs to spotlight trophies about. Because their books gained and kept vast audiences all on their own power. Much like Heinlein’s.

The dog of culture cannot be wagged. You can take over institutions believing you will take over culture, but it doesn’t really work like that. The Soviet system dominated the Eastern Bloc for most of a century. It literally owned every institution. But all it did was teach generations of Iron Curtain dwellers to subsist on black humor about how their supposed Socialist paradise was in fact a corrupt hell of bureaucrats, toadies, secret police, and fear.

I believe we’re entering something like that, where American pop culture is concerned. The Woke own the big gaming companies, along with gaming media. But who’s buying and playing the games? Similarly, the Woke own the big movie studios and all of the media media, but ticket sales have cratered on huge blockbuster projects over and over, and keep cratering. More broadly, the Woke own the Ivy League, but all this does is make people question if the Ivy League still matters anymore? Or, does a PhD even matter if the person putting those letters next to their name is a raving loon stuffed with terrible ideas and terrible politics, like a rotten Christmas turkey?

You can corrupt an organization, but you cannot corrupt people if they don’t want to be corrupted. In this regard Sad Puppies was a spectacular success. Because it was the loud, emphatic shout of the normie SF/F reader who used to esteem the Hugo and refused to let the Hugo go quietly into the night. People who could not be convinced that mediocre or even terrible storytelling with Woke wrappings and trappings was in fact brilliant and timeless.

Again, the dog of culture cannot be wagged.

UPDATE: JDA adds his perspective at Fandom Pulse:

The controversy began in the mid 2010s when it became obvious that works were being nominated for the politics of the author and not because of the content of them, in tandem with Tor Books clearly running behind-the-scenes ops to influence the awards toward their authors for marketing purposes. Larry Correia posted up a slate of works he thought were good for his fans to enjoy, and it spiraled from there.

The media attacked everyone involved, calling them racists, Nazis, and the usual insults that sane people ignore. However, it was a different time back then, and the pressure was immense. Vox Day, the publisher of the fine books imprint Castlia Library, saw the writing on the wall that they would never allow the proverbial “normies” influence ithin the culture, and formed a secondary group called The Rabid Puppies where he used his gaming experience to torpedo the entire system by nominating absurd works to ensure nothing but the most extreme would win, tarnishing the reputation of the Hugo Awards forever… Was there a winner for the Puppies? Yes, and it has to be decisively and objectively stated that it was Vox Day.

I still have my Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies shirts. And I still wear them with great pride. Especially since when you look at the list of the current Hugo Awards today, you see absolutely nothing but Tor, Tor Tor… thereby underlining my original point, and, more or less, Larry Correia’s. The Hugo Awards ceased to be about science fiction a long, long time ago.

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The Freaks of File 770

The celebration of Pride Month with the arrest of yet another SJW is fitting, but it’s no surprise, and is just one of the many reasons I’ve never granted any legitimacy to the Social Justice freakshows who always attempt to posture as if they’ve got the moral high ground in response to things like Rabid Puppies, Comicsgate, and everything else that threatens their relentless degradation of the cultural milieu.

Andrew Farago, the curator of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum and one of the more prominent progressive voices in the organized comics community, was arrested June 3 on 20 counts of invasion of privacy after secretly recording birthday party guests using the bathroom at his Berkeley home, according to court documents obtained by The Berkeley Scanner.

The allegations date to May 23, when Farago co-hosted a birthday party at his South Berkeley residence. During the party, a woman found Farago’s cellphone concealed and recording video in the bathroom. The phone contained footage of Farago himself setting up the recording, according to police, as he had hidden the device under a towel and positioned it to capture guests’ genitalia as they used the restroom. Party guests included both adults and children.

When the woman confronted him, Farago made admissions and stated he had deleted the videos from his phone and the cloud, according to Berkeley police. Officers subsequently obtained an arrest warrant, arrested Farago at his home on June 3, and served a search warrant seizing approximately a dozen electronic devices…

He spent a lot of time on social media, especially Twitter pre-Elon Musk takeover, harassing artists and professionals such as Cyberfrog creator Ethan Van Sciver who put up with his relentless attacks for years. Van Sciver reacted to the news, “It doesn’t surprise me that someone who mercilessly worked to ruin my life and career, and the careers of so many others who loved to make comic books, but were political conservatives or followers of our Savior Jesus Christ, trespassed on the sacred privacy of the friends and guests he invited into his home. Andrew Farago represented so many pillars of the mainstream comic book industry, like The Comics Journal, San Diego Comic Con, DC Comics, Hachette Group Distribution, and the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. He even wrote a book about Snoopy. His behavior, which involved hiding his cell phone under a towel in his guest bathroom in order to film the genitals of his party guests, is emblematic of the sickness that lurks in mainstream comics, where evil is welcomed and feted, and traditional American values are hunted and despised. I hope he finds Jesus Christ through diligent prayer and bible study should he be sent to prison, where he belongs.”

EVS is right. This sort of behavior isn’t sickness or even personal weakness, it’s a systemic spiritual state in which they all wallow with literal pride.

Speaking of Pride and predictability, the UK’s first gay adoptive parents were just arrested and “charged with rape, sexual assault and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation.”

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The Irony Goes to 11

Fandom Pulse chronicles the official death of science fiction and the SFWA:

SFWA has done the unthinkable and named N.K. Jemisin, Grandmaster of Science Fiction, which they plan to celebrate at their upcoming Nebula Awards Conference, as the club continues to push into political propaganda, abandoning any semblance of being a professional science fiction writers’ organization.

N.K. Jemisin is best known as a diversity-hire in publishing with a penchant for black activism, hailed as one of the greatest writers out there despite her works being narrowly focused on race-baiting agitation…

How this helps professional science fiction writers in the least is beyond anything Fandom Pulse could come up with. We reached out to Vox Day, the editor in chief of Castalia House Publishing, and a recent science fiction #1 bestseller with his co-written Space Fleet Academy: Year One. He commented on Jemisin’s nomination, “I congratulate SFWA on completing its self-destructing speed run and rendering itself entirely irrelevant to the actual genre of science fiction literature.”

The beardy old school SF writers never should have let Anne McCaffrey convince them to change SFWA’s bylaws. The devolution of the organization is even more complete than that of what is now a minor subgenre of Romantasy.

The idea that JRR Tolkien, John C. Wright, Neal Stephenson, and Tanith Lee are not “SFWA grandmasters,” but NK Jemisin, is serves to conclusively prove that whatever that status might signify, it is not being a Grand Master of literature.

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Larry Correia is a Giant Cancer

In the aftermath of yesterday’s blog post about Larry Correia, and the subsequent Arkhaven Nights stream on UATV, a number of people have asked me about the facts of the matter to which Larry was referring in such a dishonest manner to the editor of Baen Books and science fiction professionals. First, here is the email Larry sent out to JDA, Toni Weisskopf, Jason Cordova, Brad Torgersen, and Sarah Hoyt:

From: Larry Correia monsterhunter45@hotmail.com
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025at 11:02 AM
To: Jon Del Arroz jdelarroz@gmail.com, Toni Weisskopf toni@baen.com, cordova829@gmail.com cordova829@gmail.com, brad.r.torgersen@comcast.net brad.r.torgersen@comcast.net, Sarah Almeida Hoyt scifihoyt@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Interview With Christopher Ruocchio

I’d say I hope you have a nice Christmas with your family, but you probably can’t because of that domestic violence restraining order. Now I’m gonna block this email like I have all your other accounts, you sort of human shaped blob of herpes.

Now let’s address the facts. You may wish to note that I have read the relevant documents, including the restraining and custody orders.

  1. There was a restraining order filed against JDA by his ex-wife in 2023, two months after she filed for divorce. It was not filed on the basis of domestic violence, nor is there any mention of violence, domestic or otherwise, in the order.
  2. The restraining order was requested on the basis of text messages that criticized his ex-wife-to-be’s physically abusive behavior towards their children.
  3. The three-year restraining order was granted eight months later as part of the divorce settlement because the text messages sent to his ex-wife-to-be about her behavior made her feel bad and were characterized as something that “disturbs the peace”.
  4. JDA did not contest the restraining order since a) doing so would be expensive and b) he was not interested in having any contact with his ex-wife over the next three years anyhow.
  5. JDA never committed any violence, never laid a hand on his ex-wife, and was never accused by her or by anyone else of doing so. He was not even within miles of his ex-wife when the exchange of texts that served as the basis for the restraining order took place.
  6. JDA was granted full custody of the children by the court.
  7. JDA absolutely can, and will, spend Christmas with his family, which includes his children by his ex-wife, of whom he has had custody since the divorce.

In other words, Larry Correia attempted to falsely portray a married father who proactively defended his children, and still has custody of those children, as a violent wife-beater who is not permitted to be around his family at Christmastime. And in doing so, he encouraged dozens hundreds of people on social media and on YouTube, including last night on Arkhaven Nights, to post messages saying things like “why did you beat your wife” repeatedly throughout the the stream. I personally witnessed at least 20 of these obnoxious comments from at least four different accounts during the stream.

This is absolutely inexcusable and unprofessional behavior, particularly on the part of a self-styled conservative who purports to be a family man. And that cancerous behavior further exposes Larry Correia’s undeniable lack of character, which we first observed when he encouraged hundreds of Sad Puppies to spend $40 to nominate him for Hugo awards, then fled the field and abandoned his followers the moment the mainstream media took notice of him and started to call him names.

The damning thing is that Larry knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, ten years ago, he was angry about the very sort of behavior he is exhibiting now.

I’m angry. When people who haven’t talked to my wife since high school reach out to her, worried for her safety, because they read about how her husband is a wife beater, I get angry.

Indeed.

DISCUSS ON SG

Independence is Opportunity

Brien Niemeier retrospectively points out what should have been obvious, but wasn’t, to everyone all along:

For most of the twentieth century, creative ambition followed a single script. You studied the field, polished a manuscript, hunted for an agent, and prayed for a contract.

If you were in film or music, the process was different in details but identical in structure: Everything hinged on the approval of an institution. Success came from being chosen. Talent mattered, but luck mattered more. Most creators knew it but kept playing the game because the alternative seemed unthinkable.

That expectation didn’t come from nowhere. It grew out of a period when the gatekeepers could actually elevate an unknown. They possessed the distribution networks, the advertising budgets, the corporate partnerships, and the capacity to manufacture stardom.

That pattern repeated enough times to take on the aura of tradition. If you wanted a career, you knocked on the same doors everyone else knocked on. The problem is that the doors stopped opening long before artists realized the hinges had rusted shut.

By the late 1990s, the blockbuster mentality had consumed the traditional institutions. Every division—publishing, film, television, and music—became obsessed with scale. Risk tolerance flatlined. Executives seeking hits that could justify their salaries clung to anything that produced reliable profit and panicked at the unfamiliar. Innovation came to represent risk instead of opportunity.

At the same time, audiences aged. The properties that kept the lights on were the ones that debuted thirty, forty, or fifty years earlier. Instead of cultivating younger talent, the corporations recycled the same brands over and over, hoping nostalgia would substitute for relevance. You saw endless sequels, remakes, reboots, and spin-offs. The cultural oxygen was consumed by dying giants.

Creators sensed something was wrong, but most didn’t grasp how deeply the rot ran. The old structures no longer had the ability or the interest to launch new creators into the mainstream. The institutions that once acted as kingmakers had lost the will and the means to fulfill that role.

Yet legacy outlets continued promoting the old discovery narrative because it kept the talent pipeline flowing. As long as artists believed salvation waited inside the old system, they wouldn’t look for alternatives.

This conditioning left scars. Many creators still cling to the hope that one good pitch or lucky submission will unlock a career. They believe someone in a skyscraper will pluck them from obscurity and grant them access to an audience. This belief persists despite decades of evidence that the system has no interest in fulfilling creators’ expectations.

Worse, some artists internalized the idea that bypassing the old gatekeepers equates to failure. Seeing independence as a last resort, they imagine legitimacy comes only from institutional approval, even though the institutions abandoned their curatorial role.

That psychology runs deep: Creators were trained to think of themselves not as people who produce value for audiences, but as supplicants waiting for an authority figure to validate them.

The irony is that while creators waited for help, audiences changed faster than the institutions could track. Once internet access became ubiquitous, people stopped caring about traditional pipelines. Their interests moved to quality and authenticity, not pedigree.

The challenge now is that the playing fields are not even close to level. How can a podcaster compete on YouTube or Spotify when he’s banned from one, the other, or as in some cases, both? How can an author compete when the A9 algorithm, or whatever Amazon calls the way it makes winners out of losers and losers out of winners, fails to favor him?

The answer, as we were forced to figure out much, much earlier than most, is direct sales and patronage. That’s why Castalia thrives while many other publishers, including the big ones, are struggling more and more every year. It’s because we were forced to rely on you readers early on, long before

There are still challenges posed by structural elements like the payment processors, but even those challenges are starting to fade as Russia, China, and the BRICS countries improve their financial products. And what that means is that independent creators don’t have to go down with the collapsing mainstream infrastructure.

As AI improves, as the number of options improve, it’s only going to keep getting better for true independents and worse for those who still cling to the idea that the gatekeepers matter, no matter how propped up they might be.

Speaking of the collapse of the mainstream gatekeepers, shame on all of you Rabid Puppies. Shame!

I was in a small bookstore just after the Hugo blow up, and this old guy was asking the clerk for recommendations. She straight face recommended NKJemison, “She won 3 years in a row, and it’s never happened before!” Poor guy.

And that’s why it only takes 11 votes to get nominated for a Hugo these days.

DISCUSS ON SG

Larry Correia is a Big Fat Coward

I’ve tried to give the big fat coward the benefit of the doubt for a long time, but it’s just not possible anymore. His behavior is just too absurd for polite words.

You should understand three things about Larry Correia. First, he doesn’t give a fragment of a rat’s ass about anyone or anything but himself. He left all the people he led into Sad Puppies hanging and abandoned them without a second thought because he’s a little pussy who couldn’t take the heat once the mainstream press got involved. You needn’t take my word for it, just ask him about it and watch him dance like a Riverdancer on a hot plate.

I told him directly and unequivocally that it was a terrible mistake to simply cut and run, and he told me that he didn’t give a damn about the fact that people were spending $40 to participate in Sad Puppies even though he encouraged them to do so. I even told him it was wrong, but he simply did not care. Not even a little bit. The only reason Rabid Puppies came into being was because Larry and Brad were TERRIFIED of being splashed by the mainstream media’s criticism of me.

They’re total fucking cowards. They always have been. The SF-SJWs never understood me, but boy, did they nail him correctly. The International Lord of Hate was actually just the International Lord of Hurt Feelings. One would never have imagined that such a large individual could be such a sensitive little pansy.

And that’s the truth, one that I’ve been concealing for his benefit for more than ten years. But not anymore, because he’s become such an complete and unadulterated prick who just can’t control himself whenever anyone gets more attention than he does. Look at his response to Jon Del Arroz informing Baen Books and the Baen crowd that Fandom Pulse interviewed one of Baen’s authors.

From: Larry Correia <monsterhunter45@hotmail.com>
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025at 11:02 AM
To: Jon Del Arroz <jdelarroz@gmail.com>, Toni Weisskopf <toni@baen.com>, cordova829@gmail.com <cordova829@gmail.com>, brad.r.torgersen@comcast.net <brad.r.torgersen@comcast.net>, Sarah Almeida Hoyt <scifihoyt@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Interview With Christopher Ruocchio

I’d say I hope you have a nice Christmas with your family, but you probably can’t because of that domestic violence restraining order.  Now I’m gonna block this email like I have all your other accounts, you sort of human shaped blob of herpes.  

I haven’t respected Larry Correia since he ran out on Sad Puppies. But he’s become more and more despicable over the years, and the fact that now he’s taken the ticket shouldn’t surprise anyone. Now he’s openly engaging in libel.

So, Larry, your wife and your family are fair game now. Don’t cry about it, you’re the one who went there and no one made you do it.

Second, Larry’s a coward. He loves to own the libs on Facebook, but he’s too much of a coward to ever stand up for anything that actually matters. He’d disown literally anyone and everything in order to protect his precious book sales, even though he’s never been good enough to get signed by a major publisher in his life. He was afraid to go solo even though I told him he should nearly ten years ago, because he needed the Baen security blanket until it became evident that Baen is not long for this world.

The third thing is that Larry is deeply and fundamentally insecure. That’s why he lashes out at people unnecessarily. That’s what originally motivated Sad Puppies. I don’t know why JDA threatens him, but it’s impossible to miss.

I’ve kept my mouth shut about the fat cowardly cunt out of respect for his past accomplishments, which are legitimate and real. But I think a decade of silence about his observable and undeniable shortcomings is more than sufficient, considering that his behavior is actually getting worse over time. And, as you may recall, I gave him fair warning the last time he spouted off for no reason.

Tune to Arkhaven Nights for more…

DISCUSS ON SG

Grokipedia is Already Better

Elon Musk is correct. Even version 0.1 of Grokipedia is better than Wikipedia. It also points to the way forward for Infogalactic. Who needs editors when you’ve got AI? Here is an excerpt from its entry on Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies:

Theodore Beale, writing under the pseudonym Vox Day and founder of Castalia House publishing, launched the Rabid Puppies campaign on February 2, 2015, as an independent but parallel effort to the Sad Puppies initiative. Beale positioned it as a response to what he viewed as an entrenched ideological clique—derisively termed “CHORFs” (cliquish Hugo-oriented right-thinking fans) and “SJWs” (social justice warriors)—that allegedly controlled Hugo nominations through low-turnout bloc voting favoring message-driven works over entertainment value. Unlike the Sad Puppies’ focus on recommending overlooked popular fiction, Beale explicitly instructed supporters to nominate his slate items “precisely as they are” to maximize disruption and demonstrate the system’s susceptibility to organized external participation, including promotion of Castalia House titles like the anthology Riding the Red Horse.

The 2015 Rabid Puppies slate overlapped significantly with the Sad Puppies recommendations, featuring works such as Jim Butcher’s Skin Game for Best Novel and Edward M. Lerner’s Slow Bullets for Best Novella, but also included Beale’s self-nominated editing credits. This coordination, combined with Rabid supporters’ higher discipline in nominating all slate items, resulted in Puppy-affiliated works occupying most finalist slots across categories, including five of five in Best Novella and Best Short Story—displacing approximately 80% of what would have been conventional nominees based on prior years’ patterns. Hugo nomination tallies, with around 2,000 nominators compared to historical averages under 1,500, underscored the campaigns’ amplification of voter turnout among previously unengaged readers.

In the July 2015 final voting phase, involving about 4,000 ballots, Rabid Puppies nominees frequently ranked below “No Award” in a backlash from established fandom, with Beale’s professional editor nominations receiving the lowest support (e.g., 165 first-place votes out of thousands). Beale framed this as a strategic success, arguing that the widespread “No Award” usage—unprecedented in scale, affecting five categories—exposed the awards’ politicization, as opponents prioritized ideological purity over merit, effectively “burning down” the Hugos rather than allowing non-conforming works to win. He continued the campaign in 2016 and 2017, adapting to rule changes like E Pluribus Hugo by nominating provocative entries such as Chuck Tingle’s satirical Space Raptor Butt Invasion, which secured a finalist spot and amplified mockery of the process, though with reduced dominance (e.g., only partial slate success in 2016). Beale’s efforts, drawing from a dedicated online following, highlighted empirical vulnerabilities in the pre-reform Hugo system, where small, cohesive groups could sway outcomes amid chronically low participation rates below 5% of World Science Fiction Society membership.

In 2016, author Kate Paulk organized Sad Puppies 4, announcing the campaign on September 3, 2015, with a focus on compiling crowd-sourced recommendation lists rather than a strict slate to promote broader participation and avoid accusations of ballot manipulation. The final list, released on March 17, 2016, included only works receiving at least two recommendations across categories, emphasizing entertainment value and fun over ideological messaging. Despite this shift, the campaign exerted limited influence on nominations, as the ballot was overwhelmingly dominated by the parallel Rabid Puppies slate led by Vox Day, which secured 64 of its 81 recommended works on the shortlist across all categories.

It’s a much more detailed, and accurate, account of what really happened. Of course, they never seem to bother mentioning what motivated me to burn down the Hugo Awards, which was the false accusations that I’d somehow “gamed” my 2014 nomination in the Best Novelette category for “Opera Vita Aeterna”. I therefore showed them what gaming a nomination actually looks like when you’re a game designer.

The real success of Sad Puppies, of course, was the inevitable reaction to it. Seriously, SF-SJWs are just reprehensibly stupid. The rules prevented us from permanently burning the whole thing down, so I had to come up with a way to provoke them into doing it themselves.

DISCUSS ON SG

In Which the Cancellers are Cancelled

Worldcon’s death-spiral toward extinction continues apace, as chronicled by Fandom Pulse:

Worldcon used to be the gold standard of science fiction conventions. Creators like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and more would get together every year to share ideas, build community, and help the genre altogether. It’s a good idea, in theory.In its past, of course, it’s also been mired with controversy, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen using convention rooms as places to rape children, something that long-stained its history when it came out in recent years.

Beyond this, Worldcon had turned its back on conservatives for an extreme-leftist agenda that reared its ugly head in the mid-2010s with the Hugo Awards, when they prioritized politics over good storytelling to the determinant of the award. It never recovered its prestige. It resulted in 2018 having a protest against pedophilia outside of the convention where, oddly, many of the panelists counter-protested against the protest. The implication is that several of those people apparently stand for pedophilia.

In recent years, they’ve had more controversies, such as having the weapons’ manufacturer Raytheon sponsor the convention, heading to China to have the CCP dictate who could be nominated for their awards, and then using their platform to urge that travel to the United States is somehow dangerous as an attack on President Donald Trump and America—despite the convention being in Seattle this year and Los Angeles in the next.

Now, they have posted a blog that turned their entire leftist community on them, not because of pedophilia or extremist political causes, or supporting weapons manufacturers that bomb children in Middle Eastern countries, or for bowing to the human-rights violating CCP, no, the line they’ve drawn is that ChatGPT was used to vet potential panelists for their ever-shrinking convention, as the science fiction landscape has grown so niche that the con organizers simply didn’t know who most of the people were who applied for spots.

At this point, the “science fiction community” as it was known and loved by the likes of Roger Zelazny and Jerry Pournelle is effectively dead. The material being published by the genre publishers is no longer science fiction, the authors are complete nobodies whom nobody either knows or reads, the magazines are no longer being published, and the one healthy subgenre, military science fiction, is entirely written and read by people who have nothing to do with the tattered remnants of what was once a vibrant sub-literary genre.

It’s really remarkable to read Zelazny’s comments on the community in which he lived and the genre he loved, and see how far from his expectations for the future both of them have fallen.

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The End of Monster Hunter

May also mean the end of Baen Books, if Fandom Pulse’s logic is correct:

Larry Correia has made a Facebook post stating he won’t even begin writing the next Monster Hunter International books until 2026, which means a two-year dry spell of revenue for the embattled publisher. However, it gets even worse, as Correia has stated that this book will likely be his last in the series.

But never fear, there are still monsters and they still need to be hunted. Or, at least, controlled, which is why Monster Control Incorporated is on the job and is being serialized every week at Sigma Game.

I’ve been walking my crush home since last week to protect her from all the creeps walking around. Next week I’m going to introduce myself to her.

Right now, though, I was content to stay in the shadows, watching from a distance as she made her way down the dimly lit sidewalk. Her name was Elise, and she worked the late shift at the diner on 5th and Main. Every night at 11:30, she stepped out, adjusted her bag over her shoulder, and started the six-block walk to her apartment. And every night, I followed.

Not in a creepy way. At least, I hoped not. The city had gotten bad lately—muggers, weirdos, and worse. The kind of things most people didn’t believe in until it was too late. I’d seen the news reports: Missing Persons. Unexplained Attacks. Animal Maulings. The cops didn’t have a clue. But I did.

I knew what was out there.

Elise turned the corner, her fair hair bright under the glow of a flickering streetlight. She was small, and delicate, but moved with a quiet confidence that made my chest tighten. I kept my distance, staying far enough back that she wouldn’t notice me, close enough that I could reach her in seconds if something went wrong.

Something went wrong a lot these days.

Tonight, the air smelled like rain and something else—something musky and wild. My fingers twitched at my sides. I didn’t carry a gun. Guns were too loud, too messy. Instead, I had a knife sheathed at my belt and a length of silver chain wrapped around my wrist.

Elise hummed softly to herself, oblivious. She had no idea what was coming.

Then I heard it—the low, guttural growl from the alley up ahead.

You’ve never seen a monster hunter quite like Horace “Race” Scrubb before. He puts the L in “professional”.

DISCUSS ON SG

I Did Warn Them

I wasn’t even remotely surprised by the SF-SJWs reaction to the triumphant Puppies’ campaigns. But I did find it a little ironic that a group of people who were supposed to be at least modestly conversant with science clearly weren’t familiar with Newton’s Third Law.

The Hugo Awards have been embroiled in controversy too many times in the last decade to have much relevancy anymore. Once known as science fiction’s Oscars, the publishing industry has turned off most casual readers from their incessant political activism and gotten to a point where it’s hardly notice anymore who’s winning these ballots.

Back in 2016, it took a lot of votes to get a nomination for the Hugo Awards. 3,695 ballots were cast for Worldcon that year, and you’d find familiar names for Best Novel such as Neal Stephenson and Jim Butcher among the list of those nominated ,even though much more niche works eventually won…

All of these problems have only compounded in recent years as more people have tuned out.

By the numbers, the best novel category had 3,695 ballots in 2016. In 2024, even after the controversy in China, there were 1,420 ballots cast,. This year, however, only 1,078 ballots were cast for the most popular category, less than thirty percent of a decade ago.

Once you understand how convergence works, then you know what is going to happen, even if it takes years for the inevitable to play itself out. In fairness to the SF-SJWs, though, this was only a very small part of a large societal trend in the same direction which has rendered many, if not most organizations totally incapable of performing their original functions.

Both the SFWA and the Hugo Awards are already dead from the perspective of their original purposes. It shouldn’t be much longer before they both go the way of the now-defunct Nebula Jury, the Campbell Award, and World Fantasy’s Lovecraft statuette.

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